Thomas Holterbach

I am a third year PhD student. My research aims at improving the routing convergence in the Internet. I have interests in BGP, Software-defined Networks and Internet measurements.

I received both my Bachelor and Master degrees in Computer Science from the University of Strasbourg, France. Before joining ETH, I worked six months at Internet Initiative Japan, where I was supervised by Cristel Pelsser and Randy Bush. In 2016, I worked six months at CAIDA where I was supervised by Alberto Dainotti.

SWIFT: Predictive Fast Reroute.

@inproceedings{holterbach2017swift,
title={SWIFT: Predictive Fast Reroute},
author={Holterbach, Thomas and Vissicchio, Stefano and Dainotti, Alberto and Vanbever, Laurent},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication},
pages={460--473},
year={2017},
organization={ACM}
}

Network operators often face the problem of remote outages in transit networks leading to significant (sometimes on the order of minutes) downtimes. The issue is that BGP, the Internet routing protocol, often converges slowly upon such outages, as large bursts of messages have to be processed and propagated router by router. In this paper, we present SWIFT, a fast-reroute framework which enables routers to restore connectivity in few seconds upon remote outages. SWIFT is based on two novel techniques. First, SWIFT deals with slow outage notification by predicting the overall extent of a remote failure out of few control-plane (BGP) messages. The key insight is that significant inference speed can be gained at the price of some accuracy. Second, SWIFT introduces a new dataplane encoding scheme, which enables quick and flexible update of the affected forwarding entries. SWIFT is deployable on existing devices, without modifying BGP.
We present a complete implementation of SWIFT and demonstrate that it is both fast and accurate. In our experiments with real BGP traces, SWIFT predicts the extent of a remote outage in few seconds with an accuracy of ?90% and can restore connectivity for 99% of the affected destinations.

Quantifying interference between measurements on the RIPE Atlas platform.